And then I see a droplet of scarlet blood ooze from the underside of the blade, another and another. “I will stay!” I find myself saying. “I will stay. Just please, please, Jessamine, drop that fucking knife! Jesus! Please!”
And she does; the knife falls to the floor with a soft clatter and she pulls her thin arms in toward herself, like broken wings, her furled fists against her chin, and she falls into my body, into my embrace, and I hold her for dear life, thinking: Fuck, what the hell have I done?
chapter thirty-eight
ANNIE
I remember that day clearly. The children were at a nice age. Jessamine was eighteen, Jasper was two years younger. Jessamine was a dreamer; she wanted to be an actress. She’d been at one of the best private schools in North London, yet had managed to fail all but four of her GCSEs, including English and math, which we had to pay handsomely for her to retake at a crammer school the year after. The year after that she went to stage school, where she had just about scraped a pass.
A few weeks later, after graduating, she would leave, make a film, have a stupid affair, get her heart broken, get an office job, fall in love with her married boss, move back home, and never leave. And Jasper… well, we could never have imagined the path his life would take.
But on that warm summer’s day back in 2005, we knew none of that. We were happy at last and we were blissful in our ignorance of all that was to come.
I had just sliced into a quiche. Or was it a pork pie? I can’t remember. I just know that I was holding my slicing knife when it happened: the sound of a small, friendly female voice over the fence at the side of the garden.
“Excuse me?”
We all stopped and looked at each other.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
Allen put down his napkin in that slow, measured way of his and got to his feet. He stood and turned to the fence and said, “Can we help you?”
“Well, maybe. It’s just there’s a cat out here and it’s stuck and I wondered if it was yours?”
I saw Allen’s expression change to alarm. “Is it gray?” he asked.
“Yes,” came the voice.
“Wait there, I’m coming round.”
“Actually, it’s OK,” came the female voice. “I’ve got him free. Shall I pop him over?”
“No,” said Allen. “Come to the side, just to your left. There’s a gate.”
And then a moment later, the gate opened, and a girl walked in carrying Allen’s cat in her arms. She was pretty, with long, dark, wavy hair, dark eyes, a pale denim jacket, a spotty dress, white Converse, a canvas bag with badges on it—scruffy, but artfully so.
The cat jumped down and ran toward the back door of the house.
“His collar was caught on a tangle,” the girl explained.
“Her,” said Allen. “She’s a girl. And thank you. We’re very grateful to you. Would you like to sit down? Have a glass of water, something to eat?”
There was a gleam of sweat on the girl’s forehead. “Yes,” she said thankfully, “actually, a glass of water would be amazing.”
I could tell then that she was enchanted, tantalized, could barely believe that she had entered this secret corner of this magical enclave. People peer over walls and fences and gates in the Vale; they want to know what’s behind them, who lives here, what secret universe we inhabit. And now this gorgeous, fresh-faced girl was on the other side and there was a table laid with a French linen cloth that had been in my mother’s family since the early 1900s, two lovely teenagers, me, my handsome husband and his precious cat, the sun shining through trees and rosebushes, the sense of being somehow a part of the Heath itself here, right at the very farthest tipof the Vale. I could imagine her telling her friends about this later on, this magical interlude.
Allen had not brought a girl home for a long time at that point in our lives. I thought that phase was over, but I could feel it in the air that afternoon—smell it even, and my smile was brittle, my voice was flat.
My husband pulled a chair out for her; I poured her a glass of iced water; she sat down.
chapter thirty-nine
Back at Seven Dials, Jane searches her email contacts for a man called Tobias Wilson.
Tobias is retired now, but was once Tony’s security consultant, and of course, when she was Tony’s wife, he’d been responsible for Jane’s safety too. He’s everything you’d imagine a private security manager to be: plainly handsome, low-key, gently spoken, and hugely discreet. A former assistant commissioner at the Met, he’s married with twin daughters who are both lawyers and he lives somewhere in a place that’s near London but not London and that’s as much as Jane knows about him. But he was very helpful earlier in the year when Jane was trying to track down the marriage scammer, and now she is hoping that Tobias Wilson might be equally helpful with information about the missing person investigated by police at Thornwood in 2020.
Dearest Tobias
